Press play to listen!
And here we go with the first of 33 1/3 radio shows going live for one week. At the end of the week it will be replaced by show 2 but there will be both Apple and Spotify playlists of all the tracks included, available when the show is replaced.
It’s the first show I’ve done for quite some time, and it’s recorded live, so I was a bit rusty but I think it went ok. Let me know if you manage to find the time to have a listen.
I have everything set up on the Mac and just received these:
Which were well reviewed and fairly cheap (I am only one of those things) and I have quickly tested, they work. So I have already selected the songs for the first show and now just need to do some bits and pieces and then record it. Both of my regular listeners will be ever so pleased.
It will not be streamed live this time, my plan is to upload the show and have it live for a week, then it will be taken down and replaced with the next show. For the first show every track is on a shelf in my vinyl collection.
Oh, and you can subscribe to a newsletter for reminders, track lists etc. HERE should you wish to, no spam, promise.
The greatest Top Of The Pops episode ever was in 1980 and my memory of it was wrong. I was absolutely convinced Kraftwerk were on it but having done some research it would appear they weren’t. There were, however, a load of songs that I loved (and some I really, really didn’t, but TOTP was always like that). I think it was the 13th March 1980 episode, which ran as follows:
Playlist:
(23) Rush – Spirit Of Radio (and charts) *
(39) The Dooleys – Love Patrol
(6) The Police – So Lonely (video) *
(20) The Detroit Spinners – Working My Way Back To You – Forgive Me Girl (Medley) (danced to by Legs & Co)
(25) Brothers Johnson – Stomp (video)
(40) Secret Affair – My World
(14) Liquid Gold – Dance Yourself Dizzy
(5) Rainbow – All Night Long (video) *
(8) The Vapors – Turning Japanese *
(36) Siouxsie & The Banshees – Happy House *
(18) The Gibson Brothers – Cuba
(4) Peter Gabriel – Games Without Frontiers (video) *
(3) Marti Webb – Take That Look Off Your Face
(35) Genesis – Turn It On Again *
(1) Fern Kinney – Together We Are Beautiful
(7) Captain & Tenille – Do That To Me One More
They were confusing times. I liked Punk and I liked Prog and it was illegal, or something, to do that. There are 7 songs on the show that I liked, 7 was a lot, 2 or 3 was the usual. I’m convinced Peter Gabriel appeared on the show and it wasn’t a video but I looked it up and his only ever appearance on the show was two months later with a different song (No Self Control) so I’m pretty sure this is the right episode.
I was at a friends house and had to watch it on a little portable TV in his parents bedroom as they were watching something else on the big TV downstairs. Despite definitely having watched this episode there are songs I really don’t remember at all, such as ‘Stomp’ by The Brothers Johnson and ‘Dance Yourself Dizzy’ by Liquid Gold. There are also songs I didn’t know I remembered, like ‘Cuba’ by The Gibson Brothers and ‘Together we are beautiful’ by Fern Kinney. Memory is a delicate thing.
Here is that Top Of the Pops reconstructed for your viewing and listening pleasure (some of the performances aren’t from that actual dates show but from the one before or after but it’s near enough, oh, and the way they included Rush is really very disappointing)
So it may not be the greatest TOTP ever, but it was pretty good apart from Steve Wright being on at and being dick, at least there was no Jimmy Saville, the scumbag. .
Like all lists, they are the opinion of the compiler of the list and compilers are subject to error, me more than most! I would be more than happy to be told I’m totally wrong and should change this list. So tell me if you want to.
25. Heart of Soul
24. American Horse
23. Born to Be Wild
22. Black Angel
21. Go West
20. Peace Dog
19. Wild Hearted Son
18. Big Neon Glitter
17. Rise
16. Bad Fun
15. Dirty Little Rockstar
14. Nirvana
13. Love
12. Spiritwalker
11. Sun King
10. Revolution
9. Fire Woman
8. Sweet Soul Sister
7. Painted On My Heart
6. Edie (Ciao Baby)
5. Wild Flower
4. Love Removal Machine
3. Rain
2. Lil’ Devil
1. She Sells Sanctuary
Just got to song 17 and I need to hear no more, this is the winner:
I’ve had a bit of a change by upgrading my account and removing ads. I’ve also changed the template so it all looks a bit different. This also means I can upload audio and video directly, so I’ll have a go at that at some point.
I’m hoping to stream a weekly radio show again when I get the equipment sorted. Getting the equipment sorted is actually more difficult than I would like, the soundcard on my laptop is completely dead and the cost of replacing it is about the cost of a new laptop so I haven’t bothered, however, I have one of these:
And it should do the job, I just need a headset mic to replace the one I misguidedly bought last week (it’s bluetooth, the lag is ridiculous).
Also, I have changed the title of the site to ‘Thirty Three And A Third’ complete with a domain name, so thirtythreeandathird.blog now gets you here.
So some things happened, basically around stumbling over RSD 17 releases that I didn’t get on the day and, perhaps in a couple of cases, didn’t know I wanted.
Head records in Leamington had a second shipment after RSD for some reason so there were a couple of things there that were gone on my previous visits but had since turned up again. As a reminder, I had already picked up the following:
Field Music ‎– Tones Of Town
Faust (7), Ulan Bator ‎– Untitled
Richard Pinhas, Camera (10) ‎– Camera / Richard Pinhas
Cocteau Twins ‎– Four-Calendar Café
Cocteau Twins ‎– Milk & Kisses
Mew – Frengers
Future Sound Of London – Archived : Environmental : Views
Then, from the second shipment I picked up:
Asobi Seksu – Citrus
Steve Reich – LSO Percussion Ensemble ‎– Sextet | Clapping Music | Music For Pieces Of Wood
The LSO video above is the whole 28 minutes or so of Sextet, because it is an amazing piece of music and, apparently, really hard to play! Performed by Neil Percy, Sam Walton, David Jackson, Antoine Bedewi, Philip Moore & Simon Crawford-Phillips.
Earlier in the week I was on the Cowley Road in Oxford and briefly poped into Truck, who, much to my surprise, had this:
So I picked that up and, to my further surprise, they had this 7″ single:
The Smiths ‎– The Boy With The Thorn In His Side
So that must surely be that for RSD 2017, although there were a couple of Ennio Morricone  soundtracks that I’d like and there’s the soundtrack to Belgica by Soulwax, and Popol Vuh, and the three Spacemen 3 albums of course and possibly Sun Ra & Merzbow and, and, no, that has to be it, has to be, this whole thing is too damn expensive.
A pack of cigarettes is now between £7 & £10 and, at the lower end, that’s for 17 not 20, for what the average smoker would get through in a day. Recently I took a chance on an album because I liked the cover and because it was brand new and priced at £5, not even a packet of fags. Also, how could anybody not be drawn in by this cover?
It is kind creepy and somehow quite Nordic. Which could be because Bjørn is Norwegian. I knew nothing but the cover that was in my hands, that it was originally released in 1999 and the track list:
These three things made me feel that a £5 investment in this album was a safe bet, and I was absolutely right. I found a good review HERE and here are a couple of paragraphs from it (follow the link for more):
Torske’s debut, Nedi Myra, was not a huge departure from some of the more experiential house music of the late ’90s. You can hear shades of Pépé Bradock, Idjut Boys and Daniel Wang. The album’s opener, “Expresso,” is a fairly straightforward but classy piece of filtered house. Other tracks, such as “Station To Station” and “Fresh From The Bakery,” are full of odd character but still totally recognisable as house music.
But in between were hints of something more unusual. Even the album’s cover, which looks more like a creepy psych rock sleeve than the work of a DJ, would have seemed out of step with dance music at the time. Take “Smoke Detector Song”: it’s a burbling, slo-mo synth jam with elements of trip-hop, dub, prog rock fusion and downtempo Underground Resistance. “Beautiful Thing” is equally hard to place, its swinging groove and sci-fi synths calling to mind Floating Points. By far the album’s wackiest moment is “Ode To A Duck,” an electronic Bossa Nova number from another dimension.
What I found was that I could listen to it repeatedly and never seem to tire of it, I think it was on a loop for about two hours at one point and I didn’t realise, but nothing prompted me to switch to a different album (this being a streamed version of course).
I missed pretty much everything to do with House music, and any of its iterations, in this case Deep House, by virtue of being too bloody old, but that doesn’t stop me discovering it now and really enjoying it. Below, from soundcloud, is track 3, ‘Eight Years’, have a listen and see what you think.
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